I moved to New York two days before starting work at Gawker in the fall of 2014. When I walked up the stairs to the office in Soho I was acutely unsure of how to hold my body so I wouldn’t seem terrified: the only person I knew in the building was Emma, who had taken me to Jezebel from the Hairpin, where it had just been the two of us, working from computers across the country, and where she had hired me off email in summer 2013, before we’d ever met.

Emma was a person with whom I already had an unusually close relationship, but not yet the kind of friend you become only after your lives collapse onto each other completely—after you spend three years (including a past one that would make for a gripping if overscripted HBO miniseries) playing through work and working through your personal life, refracting every thought you have from 8:30 a.m. till midnight through the increasingly identical spaces of each other’s brains. Emma—and the places in which I’ve worked with and for her—is a reason as fixed as my disposition why I can’t separate what I like and what I do, even in an introductory two years of office employment that began with Gamergate; split open when she, my best friend or editor or boss, was catastrophically injured after non-metaphorically being hit by a truck; cracked again and kept cracking with the Conde post, the Hogan trial, the Thiel bankruptcy, and, almost worse, the wave each new development produced: a public and roughly bimonthly performance of perceived superiority to this company, which is occasionally distasteful and aggressively unconcerned with public approval, but never panders and never lies.

It’s easy to dismiss those values, or the way they look in practice, and why? Efficiency and directness do sometimes intersect with cheap. But there’s something else going on, a displacement. The problems people identify in any successful online media outlet (cheapness, vapidity, prurience, etc) are hot potatoes tossed between writer and audience, and the distance between writer and audience has shrunk. A compromise between them, a mirage of water in a desert of smarm, has formed in the valorization of likability and consensus—two things that often seem like moral goods in themselves, which they’re not, rather than unpredictable and secondary rewards.

And so solidifies the foundation for a new kind of media so shaped by social distribution that likability and consensus do become goods qua goods. It’s been interesting to have my first two years in New York, my first two full-time in media, take place at a company where, no matter good the story, people will be quick to disown the source (“I never link to Jezebel, but…”)—all the while a post-libertarian billionaire/Facebook board member/Trump delegate systematically sued us into bankruptcy for reasons that put him in near-exact alignment with many of the people, anonymous to influential, whose performatively negative opinions about my workplace I have been hearing for two years.

Anyway. What’s always been clear to me: Gawker Media’s horizontal organization and editorial independence, defended at all costs, is what facilitates mistakes and transgressions and also makes possible every single good thing we are able to do. The I-never-link-to-Jezebel-but construction is an outside reader’s endless and self-contradictory attempt to classify it all as typically reprehensible or surprisingly against type; from the inside, all the work seems individual and situational, related only in that we all did not have to get much approval to do it.